SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

“He felt it coming, the collapse…[but] his thoughts were clear as the weakness drained his body, and in that clarity he thought, absurdly, that this must be what it felt like to freeze to death or to have a stone crush the breath out of your body.  The comparison made him wince despite his anxiety: see what melodrama tiredness can induce?” – thoughts of Abbas during his illness.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in Zanzibar and now teaching writing in England, has often focused during his writing career on the many issues of immigration – the difficulties of immigrants in adjusting to a new culture, the guilt sometimes felt about the family and culture left behind, and, ultimately, the confusion about what “home” means and the sometimes painful, almost physical, yearning for it. His novels, which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Whitbread (now Costa) Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year Award, have been thoughtfully written, with settings in Zanzibar, the Tanzania mainland, Kenya, and England (from the point of view of the immigrant), but it is this novel, The Last Gift, which may finally bring him the greater recognition he deserves.

The most detailed and complex novel he has written on the subjects of immigration and displacement so far, The Last Gift is a multigenerational novel which opens with Abbas, a sixty-three-year-old man whose origins are, at first, unknown, returning to his residence in England after work.  A conscientious, driven man, he is also very private, keeping to himself and not sharing his past even with his family.  He becomes ill on the way home one extremely cold day, so ill that this proud man “wishes for someone to pick him up and carry him home.”  On the bus he “watches himself from beside himself,” and when he finally arrives at his own bus stop, he is not sure if he will survive the walk home. Eventually, forcing himself to walk slowly and refusing to ask anyone for help, he arrives at his house, teeth chattering, heavily sweating in the cold, and only semi-conscious.  Collapsing, he is taken to the hospital, where, worried, in pain, and thinking he might die, he realizes “that he had left things for too long, as he had known for so many years.  There was so much he should have said, but he had allowed the silence to set until it became immovable.”  He regards himself as a “sinful traveller fallen ill in a strange land, after a life as useless as a life could be.”

A school perhaps similar to the one Abbas attended – the first person in his family to do so.  Photo from the Tanzania-Zanzibar International Volunteer Association, Facebook page.

Hanna, the daughter of Abbas and his wife Maryam, now calls herself Anna and works as a teacher, while their son Jamal is working on a doctorate tracing migration patterns from Africa and Asia into England.  Jamal never quite believes in the story of his mother as a foundling, and he has the feeling, regarding his father, that “There was something to be ashamed of, something that had been with him most of his life.”   Anna declares that “They are lost…Ba deliberately lost himself a long time ago, and Ma found herself lost from the beginning…What I want from them is a story that has a beginning, that is tolerable and open.”  Both children have failed to put down roots, though they are British citizens.

Two young men from Zanzibar wear the traditional kanzu shirt and kofia head covering which Abbas mentions.

The memories which Abbas has hidden for so many years continue to torment him as he begins to recover from two strokes, from which he must regain his ability to speak, and it is not until well into the novel that his own story emerges.  In the meantime, the stories of his wife Maryam, his children Hanna (Anna) and Jamal, and their relationships with each other unfold in detail.  Maryam, forty-seven when Abbas becomes ill, knows little about her own family.  Left as a foundling outside a hospital in Exeter, Maryam was only three or four days old when she entered foster care.  Her loving foster parents wanted to adopt her but were declared too old, and she was taken away at age three, only to be fostered by several other families before finding relative stability with a “mixed” family in which the woman, a nurse from a Muslim family in Mauritius, and the man, an electrician from a Hindu family from India, try to give Maryam a sense of stability and an understanding of what family means.  The irony of a British foundling being brought up by immigrants gives additional poignancy to the novel’s themes.

Two women walk down the street in Zanzibar, one wearing western dress and one wearing the buibui, the full covering now preferred by many Muslims in Zanzibar. Abbas’s first love wore the buibui.

The points of view shift among these four characters as Maryam continues to deal with Abbas’s illness and resumes her work at a hospital, and Abbas relearns how to speak and tries to work himself up to telling, finally, the secrets that he has kept hidden for thirty years.  Both parents reminisce about their childhoods and about the events which separately drove each of them to run away from the families in which they were living.  The love affairs of the children, Anna and Jamal, and their changes of cities, apartments, and houses (possibly looking for the symbolic “perfect home”) dominate much of the middle of the novel, and it is only when the children finally discover the terrible secret which Abbas has withheld that they are ready to begin to come to terms with who their parents are and, as a result, who they themselves are and where they belong.

Abbas’s early life in Zanzibar looms over and dominates the novel, even though it is a relatively short part of the narrative, and the author, while describing Abbas’s life in memorable detail from the time Abbas was a child, branches out in many different directions as he develops his themes of alienation, displacement, escape, guilt, hope, and eventually resolution among the generations.  The reader eventually comes to know Abbas’s parents and his brother and sister;  Maryam’s life with her various foster parents;  the family of Anna’s lover and their attitudes toward immigrants; Jamal’s discovery of cross-cultural love; and even ingrained post-colonial attitudes which the characters discover among the British citizens with whom they interact.

Double-click on map to enlarge it.

Occasionally, the novel becomes melodramatic, and in a few cases, even predictable, as the author attempts to illustrate every conceivable aspect of the immigrant experience, a goal which sometimes leads to too much detail about peripheral characters, some of whom might have been eliminated without losing focus.  Still, the novel fascinates, in part because it is so much more complex in its goals and structure than Gurnah’s previous novels have been.  As I read, I could not help but think that the author himself was deliberately summing up the threads and themes of his previous novels, writing this one as his grand statement.

ALSO by Abdulrazak Gurnah:   BY THE SEA,         DESERTION,      PARADISE,          GRAVEL HEART

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears in http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/

The photo of a school in Zanzibar is posted on the Facebook page for the Tanzania-Zanzibar International Volunteer Association .  TZIVA is a small volunteer organization providing technical, educational, and hands-on volunteer support to grassroots community projects on the island of Zanzibar, Tanzania.  For additional information see http://www.tziva.org/

The picture of the kanzu (shirt) and kofia (head covering), traditional dress for men in Zanzibar, comes from http://www.malcolmkirktravels.net/

The photo of the two women, one wearing the full-covering buibui, was posted on http://www.mambomagazine.com by Jaki Sainsbury

The map of Zanzibar/Tanzania appears on http://www.worldatlas.com/

ARC: Bloomsbury

Note: This novel was WINNER of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 2004.  The author was twenty-three, at the time.

“You are a miliciana.  Drop that, please,” he added, clamping his hands over the hand that held the battered notebook and grabbing [her] forearm with the other: “Or I’ll break your wrist…Now as I was saying, I don’t think we’re in any doubt as to what you are.  But I’d like to know why you were fool enough to come back here after killing a guardia.”  –Guardia Civil Sergeant Carlos Tejada Alonso y Leon, Madrid, 1939.

Setting her novel in 1939, in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, author Rebecca C. Pawel carefully recreates many of the elements which led to that civil war  and which continued in the partisan turmoil that continued long after that.  Sometimes described by Republicans as “a war between tyranny and democracy,” and by Nationalists as “a war between Communists, anarchists, and ‘Red Hordes’ against civilization,” the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939) attracted extremists on both sides.  The Socialist Republicans were aided by the Soviets, Marxists, and Bolsheviks, while the Nationalists, led by Francisco Franco, were supported by the church, monarchists, fascists, conservatives wanting to preserve their ancient land rights, and eventually by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.  Both sides had committed atrocities against their fellow citizens, leading Franco to set up the Guardia Civil, not the army, to police the cities in the aftermath of war.

The author holds her statuette of Edgar Allan Poe after winning for Best Debut Novel at the Edgar Awards in 2004

The novel opens quietly in Madrid with Maria Alejandra “Aleja” Palomino, age seven, hurrying home from school.  In her Republican neighborhood, however, she sees a guardia acting anxious, and soon afterward she hears shots.  Hiding in terror, she later hears another guardia passing her hiding place, humming as he walks.  When she eventually dares to head back to the road home, she discovers the first guardia lying dead in a pool of blood.  Terrified by what she has witnessed, she drops one of her school notebooks as she races home.  Her Republican family comforts her but is more concerned about the missing notebook than with the death of the guardia – paper is extremely valuable, and they have little money for her school supplies.  Since Aleja’s Republican neighbors would not be likely to report a dead guardia immediately, her aunt, Tia Viviana, hurries out to retrieve Aleja’s missing book.  She is caught picking it up, however, by two guardia who assume she is a Republican “miliciana.”  When questioned at the scene, she denies any involvement, insisting she came only for a child’s notebook, but thinking the notebook might contain codes, the guardia kill her, thereby setting the scene for the action to follow.

Alcazar of Toledo, originally built as a Roman palace.

Because the action, the motivations, and the shifting allegiances are complex here, the author wisely keeps her narrative style simple, moving the action along on the strength of her characters, who are memorable despite the fact that they are somewhat superficial examples of the various factions at work in Madrid at the time.  Sgt. Carlos Tejada Alonso y Leon, a mid-level guardia, is widely honored by his fellow officers, having been involved earlier in the Siege of Alcazar in Toledo, a battle in which eight hundred Nationalists, armed only with rifles and machine guns, battled eight thousand Republicans armed with heavy equipment which, ultimately, demolished much of Alcazar Castle.  The Nationalists, including Tejada, were eventually liberated by General Franco.  Though Tejada sometimes behaves in ways which will be repugnant to readers, the author also depicts him within the confused context of the period.  The murdered guardia was his best friend, Francisco Lopez Perez, known as Paco, a man with whom he had lost touch during the war and whose body he had to identify on the street.

The destruction of the Alcazar during the Spanish Civil war, shelled by Republican heavy artillery

The novel alternates between Tejada’s point of view and that of Gonzalo Llorente, the lover of the murdered Viviana, and the brother of Carmen, the child Alexa’s mother.  Gonzalo, a Republican, was one of the few to have survived a series of Nationalist executions which killed most of his fellow soldiers, having been the victim of heart problems and a high fever which kept him in the hospital at the time, and he is bent on revenge, not only for the loss of Viviana but for those earlier killings, too.  When Gonzalo finds a chocolate wrapper at the scene of the crime, the idea of black marketeering as a motivation is introduced.  Most people have too little food to eat, and no one can get luxury items, like real coffee or chocolate except through smugglers for the black market.

Most of the soldiers that Gonzalo knew were executed by Nationalists, a fate about to befall these youths. Note gun in hand of officer on right. Photo from Bridgeman Art Library / Private Collection / Peter Newark Military Pictures.

A minor romance begins between Tejada and Srta. Elena Fernandez, Aleja’s schoolteacher, who is concerned because she realizes that Aleja has witnessed the killing and fears she may be in danger as a witness.  Her meeting with Tejada leads to an exchange of information regarding their backgrounds, which is fascinating for the information it provides the reader about how and why people of similar backgrounds and education choose to support different political sides during this confusing period.  The violence inherent in an organization like the guardia, which is spread so thin that there appears to be little oversight, makes the reader resent the guardia and their cruelty toward innocent women and children, at the same time that the violence of the Republicans is equally abhorrent.

The conclusion brings all the elements together in a way which is satisfying, though it is a different kind of satisfaction, since one does not really relate to the main characters.   A surprise twist provides a sense that not everyone may be as cruel at heart as it appears from the action, though this is also a way for the author to create some much-needed empathy in a book that is otherwise almost devoid of it. Realistic and filled with the kind of details that only someone who has studied all aspects of this war would know, the novel is both a good mystery and an especially readable depiction of an otherwise confusing time of history.  It is difficult to believe that an author so young could have accumulated so much detailed knowledge about this war and even more surprising that she could have arranged it so successfully into a nonstop story in which no one is a real hero.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo from the Edgar Awards of 2004 is one of the few available.  http://www.lecturalia.com/

The Alcazar of Toledo, beseiged for months in 1936, was rescued by Gen. Francisco Franco.  Originally a Roman palace from the 3rd century, it suffered serious damage during the Spanish Civil War.  http://www.noviastravel.com/

The damage to the Alcazar is recorded in this photo from  http://www.alcazar.net/history.html

Young Republican soldiers being taken to their executions by Nationalist officers, from  the Bridgeman Art Library / Private Collection / Peter Newark Military Pictures, available on http://www.magnoliabox.com

“An allegory for our times.”

This morning, I was exchanging notes with a prolific reader who is also a friend of Mary Whipple Reviews, and she mentioned that one of her favorite books is The Industry of Souls by British author Martin Booth. I’d read and reviewed the book on Amazon in 2001, before I had this website, but I never reposted the review of that book here, despite the fact that when I read the book, I’d found it fascinating – and can even remember the book’s conclusion and the themes.  The book was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 1998 and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book in 1999, but it never achieved the audience in the US that it deserves, despite its enthusiastic reviews. 

Martin Booth, the author of seventy works, including novels, collections of his own poetry, and volumes by other authors for which he was editor and publisher, passed away on Feb. 12, 2004, at the age of fifty-nine.  This is the tenth anniversary of his death, and I hope that many of the people who read this review will honor his memory by exploring his work, maybe for the first time.  (This book is readily available as an e-book and on used book sites.)

The Industry of Souls, written in 1998, opens with a thoughtful and loving tribute to the human spirit:  “It is the industry of the soul to love and to hate; to seek after the beautiful and to recognise the ugly; to honour friends and wreak vengeance upon enemies; yet, above all, it is the work of the soul to prove it can be steadfast in these matters.”  Here, and throughout the novel, author Martin Booth focuses on ideas of industry and work, but as he expresses his ideas, he often uses deliberate, poetic parallels to Biblical verses: “[There is] a time to love and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace [Ecclesiastes]…”

Alexander Bayliss, known as Shurik, is celebrating his eightieth birthday, as the novel opens. Walking around Myshkino, the Russian village where he lives, he visits with residents and recalls his life as a prisoner in the mines of Siberia, contrasting it with his life in Myshkino since then.  At eighty, he is a man completely at peace with his world, celebrating the love, endurance, and forgiveness which have made his life not only bearable, but ultimately, full of joy.  Through flashbacks and shifting time frames, he shows how he came to be a prisoner.  Doing business in the Soviet Union, the forty-year-old British citizen was summarily arrested for espionage and sentenced to hard labor in the gulag, where he spent the next twenty years in a coal mine.  Tortured and imprisoned in the mine, Bayliss has already seen the worst of mankind, but once he has reached “the lower depths,” the deepest part of the mine, where he will live for the next twenty years, the unit leader Kirill offers advice to the group, a similar but less poetic and more practical, message than that of Ecclesiastes:  “Welcome to the rest of your lives.  And take a word of advice.  Do not dream of the day of your release…Men go mad thinking about the past, the future.   Here there is no then and no next.  There is only now.”

In the hellish darkness and depths of the mine, however, Shurik ironically finds enlightenment. One of seven men in his labor group, he and his companions become a family, fiercely loyal to each other, accepting life moment by moment, with no thoughts wasted on a future they cannot afford to contemplate.  The men come from varied backgrounds, and their views of life, molded by their own experiences, are all shared and often change during their time in the mine.  When his long sentence finally expires, Shurik goes on to lead a quiet life in the small Russian village of Myshkino, the village where Kirill lived.  Bayliss/Shurik has now lived there for the twenty years since he was released from the mines at age sixty.

A well preserved wooly mammoth baby, from 40,000 years ago. Photo by Francis Latreille/National Geographic

As he tells the stories which have made him who he is, the symbolism is clear and easily understood – the miners discovering a completely preserved wooly mammoth, then roasting and eating part of it;  a story about a fox in a cage; Shurik, after his release, acting as teacher to the children of the village and sometimes speaking in aphorisms or proverbs; the making of bread in the village;  Shurik arguing for the historic preservation of the local church, etc.  Shurik/Bayliss has a new crisis to face on his eightieth birthday, however. Communism has failed and the Soviet Union has now dissolved, and a cousin in England has found him.  The cousin will be arriving to see him soon, and he must decide whether to return to England or to stay.

This ambitious novel entertains at the same time that it conveys a strong message about man’s resilient spirit and the courage to forgive and endure.  The language is simple, the images are unforgettable, the prose style is both musical and urgent, and the characters are admirable and sympathetic. A memorable and thoughtfully constructed novel in which every detail advances Bayliss’s message – and a wonderful introduction to Martin Booth for those who have never explored his work.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from http://www.doyletics.com/

The Siberian coal mine is shown on http://www.examiner.com/

The frozen baby mammoth from 40,000 years ago was photographed by Francis Latreille/National Geographic and appears on http://www.theguardian.com as part of a story on its discovery.

Note: This book was WINNER of the Nordic Council Literature Prize and WINNER of the Norwegian Critics’ Prize for Literature.

“Several times I have remained standing in the parking lot [of the adult daycare center], like a mythological figure filled with doubt, this is the border between the underworld and our own world…I need to tell this to someone, how it feels, how it is so difficult to lie with someone who has suddenly become silent.  It is not simply the feeling that he is no longer there  It is the feeling that you are not, either.”—Eva, Simon’s wife.

This is one of the most memorable books I have read in many years (and I can count on one hand the times I have said that in a review).   Breath-taking in its emotional impact, insightful in its depiction of the main character and themes, and completely honest, the book left me weeping in places and silently begging the main character not to make some of the choices that I knew she would inevitably make.  Eva, an ordinary, elderly woman with a now-silent husband, ten years older, tells her own story, with all the hesitations, flashbacks, regrets, and questions which are tormenting her now and which have confounded her husband.  In creating Eva, Norwegian author Merethe Lindstrom has brought to life one of the most vividly depicted characters I have ever “known,” a character filled with flaws, like the rest of us, prone to second-guessing, like the rest of us, and sometimes overcome with regret for past mistakes, like the rest of us, and she does this without any hints of authorial manipulation in Eva’s story, which feels as if it is emerging of its own will from Eva’s depths.  More reminiscent of a memoir than fiction, Eva’s story ultimately offers much to think about, while offering its own silent commentary on the choices we make and how they affect those around us.

Author photo by Johannes Jansson at Norden.org

Eva, the mother of three daughters by her husband Simon, is also the mother of a son, born when she was an unmarried teenager and whom she gave up for adoption when he was six months old.  Though she does not regret that decision, she does regret the loss, and she often wonders about her son and his fate.  Whether by circumstance or design, Eva has few friends, often shunning intimacy, even with her own children, and though she eventually becomes a teacher of language and literature, she is constantly aware that the school is “rooted in its own convictions” and that she herself is probably superfluous to its success. Now retired, she admits that “I do not know if I miss the work, but I wish to be part of something, I always have the feeling of being left out, standing on the outside.”  She and Simon see their grown daughters only “now and again,” and their former colleagues and acquaintances “from time to time…That was long ago.”

Simon, a former physician, sometimes used to meet her for lunch or coffee during her free periods at school, when his appointment schedule allowed, but he is long retired.  At first they both enjoyed retirement, but Eva notes, “His gradual change started a couple of years ago…Perhaps his restlessness was present long before that, maybe it is an expression of something he has wanted for a long time  To go his own way.”  Gradually, he has become almost silent, and Eva is now forgetting the sound of his voice.  “He has become as formal as a hotel guest, seemingly as frosty as a random passenger you bump into on a bus.”  And he has begun to wander alone, out of the house, often sitting on a bench in the garden outside the Natural History Museum for hours, even in winter.  Though she takes him to a daycare center two days a week, her daughters feel that he now needs full-time care, and they have left an application with her.

In the winter Simon would sometimes sit for hours in the garden of the Museum of Natural History

From this point on, the novel becomes the stories of Simon and Eva in the past.  Their stories swirl around through Eva’s memories, shared with the reader in an order which feels random but which the author has subtly planned for dramatic effect.  Always, there are questions about what happens next in their earlier lives and how and why, though the answers to these questions by no means constitute a plot in the usual sense of the word.  Simon’s life in central Europe during World War II and its aftermath; their more recent three-year relationship with Mariya, a Latvian asylum-seeker in Norway, whom Eva and Simon hired as a house cleaner and who became Eva’s intimate friend; the young intruder who entered their house years ago when Eva and her pre-school children were alone; Simon’s need for family and his pervading sorrow about the past; their shared resentments; the attitudes of their daughters toward some of their decisions; and Eva’s attempts to assuage the guilt she feels about secrets in her own life, all appear and reappear through memories which increase the reader’s knowledge about Eva and Simon.

Much of the novel feels like a canon in music, with motifs appearing, being superseded by other motifs, then reappearing, almost like a round.  Winter brings its own obvious imagery and symbolism related to aging, life, and death.  Eva sometimes walks by a church and gradually comes to know the pastor there, though there is no overt religious symbolism or reference to an afterlife.  A mailbox given, significantly, by Mariya, brings letters bearing news of both the past and present.  Eva’s commitment to decorating a grave of someone she does not know, and a large snail shell (minus the snail) which she finds in one of her closets also raise questions about life and death and memories and home, and add to the symbolism as images reappear and add to the characterization and the vibrant inner lives of Eva and Simon.  The emphasis on winter eventually changes to that of spring and then summer, suggesting the possibility of change.

Though this is one of the most memorable books I have  read in years, it will not appeal to everyone.  (Take a look at the Amazon reviews for examples.)  This is a character-based novel, with little or no overt plot, and those expecting a “Joe [sic] Nesbo book” because of its Norwegian setting, as one Amazon reviewer confessed, will be disappointed. Ditto for those who want a straightforward narrative, a love story, and/or a story about people who are younger than “elderly.”  For those who have dealt intimately with older family members with memory problems, or those who are senior citizens themselves, however, this is a powerful, emotional, and never-to-be-forgotten novel of pure honesty and literary skill.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo by Johannes Jansson/Norden.org appears on http://en.wikipedia.org

The Natural History Museum garden in Oslo in winter is from http://www.irisbg.com

The photo of the hands, both elderly and young, is part of a program on aging presented by http://www.wbur.org

“Don’t be coy, Fergus – I mean Justice O’Reilly.  You’ve known me since I was yay high.  My name is Tristram St. Lawrence.  Tristram Amory St. Lawrence, the thirteenth Earl of Howth….I was – I am – the only son your old pal, the twelfth Earl of Howth, managed to sire, and not for lack of trying.  People have been saying a lot of bad things about me in the press.  I am here to say a few more.”

In this uniquely Irish combination of satire and morality tale, author Claire Kilroy introduces the young, alcoholic thirteenth Earl of Howth, who is testifying in a 2016 legal case about the “Celtic Tiger” and the Irish real estate “bubble” from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, a case in which he was an active, but naïve, participant.  Fueled, in part, by the investments of shadowy foreign moguls, who often provided the seed money for grand schemes in which hundreds of hopeful Irish businessmen contributed additional, usually borrowed, funds, the real estate frenzy featured gigantic construction projects on large swathes of land cleared and stripped for hotels, apartments, housing complexes, and commercial use.  Then, in 2008, the “bubble” burst, bringing down the Irish economy, banks, investment companies, and most of those individuals who had invested their hard-earned, inherited, or borrowed funds in schemes which ultimately left them penniless, their personal property gone, and their lives in shreds.  Many well known financiers and bankers were shown on television doing the “perp walk” as police led them from their now bankrupt companies.

Summoned to court years later, Tristram St. Lawrence gives evidence for ten days between March 10, 2016, and March 24, 2016, his whereabouts a mystery from the time of the real estate crash to the much later trial.  Though he was personally involved in several enormous real estate schemes during the height of the action, he was, from the outset, a front man – a figurehead whom M. Deauville, a mysterious foreign investor, chose for his noble background and the presumed legitimacy his title would bestow on the projects being undertaken by Castle Holdings, domiciled in the thousand-year-old castle in Howth owned by Tristram’s father.  M. Deauville, a man so secretive that Tristram does not even know his first name, first met Tristram when he sponsored him for Alcoholics Anonymous, and he remained constantly in touch with him, even after Tristram’s return to Ireland from Europe and America in the 1990s.  Eventually M. Deauville, whom Tristram regards as his “savior,” involved Tristram in Irish real estate investments, actively pulling the strings promoting future developments and sending Tristram and his construction manager, Desmond Hickey, to investigate new properties, even as the first mega-projects were just getting started.

Howth Castle, home of the St. Lawrence family since the 1100s.

By  combining the satire with morality tale, author Claire Kilroy is able to present Tristram’s story in a style which highlights Tristram’s almost cartoon-like vulnerability and his own role in his downfall.  Though no reader will take Tristram seriously, most readers will be empathetic as they recognize how he is manipulated on his step-by-step journey to disaster.  To give Tristram some credit, even he becomes alarmed, at one point, because “across the country people were digging themselves into big holes, [and because] big holes were spreading across Ireland like the pox, eating away at the heart of Ireland,”  but he also believes that his own doubts “were the product of a depressive mind.”  He remains involved in the various schemes, a weak man who sees this as an opportunity for quick success.

Gaffney's Summit Inn, where Tristram and Desmond Hickey first meet to plan the future.

As the frenzy of speculation continues, the lively action also reveals the character and behavior of everyone surrounding Tristram.  Desmond Hickey, the crude construction manager, will not take no for an answer and insists that alcoholic Tristram accept a pint when they first meet at a pub. It is only “divine intervention” in the form of a cellphone call from M. Deauville that keeps Tristram from succumbing to the temptation.  The energetic Hickey is soon proposing another development plan – for an abandoned castle and all its lands, and when Tristram visits the place, he has an epiphany of sorts.  “A moth-eaten oul pony”  living in the wilderness comes out from the bushes, and Tristram recognizes him as “Prince,” a childhood pet. The scene, both sentimental and cautionary, also contains elements of religiosity which contrast with the crass behavior of Hickey and Tristram to date.  “I fear,” Tristram observes, ironically, “that every blessed thing on this earth is cursed with the capacity to wonder at its predicament – Prince was left wondering what he’d done wrong.  His offense must have been egregious to be abandoned like this. It had started out so well.”

Criminal Courts of Justice, Dublin

As the book satirizes the weaknesses of Tristram and others involved in the greed and manipulation, the author overtly ties their “sins” to a kind of competition between good and evil, between a higher power and “that other fella,” at least in Tristram’s mind.  When he and Desmond Hickey are sent to investigate yet another possible development site, they both become convinced that “the end is near.”  In “the black hole” of the countryside, one dark night, Dessie confesses to feeling the Devil breathing down the back of his neck – and sitting in the back seat of his truck.  Suddenly Tristram feels it, too, though they both realize that the truck has no back seat.  The novel’s conclusion extends the morality tale, tying up loose ends of plot, including some obvious religious imagery, and tightening the overall thematic development of the novel.   Though author Claire Kilroy begins this tale with a quotation about a “Sir Tristram” in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, she ends it, appropriately, with the dark adaptation of a nursery rhyme:  “There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile./ He made a crooked deal and he blew a crooked pile./He dug a crooked hole and he sank the crooked isle./And they all went to hell in a stew of crooked bile.”  Entertaining and enlightening.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears on http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

Howth Castle has belonged to the St. Lawrence family since the time of the Vikings.  Photo from http://www.goldenireland.ie

Gaffney’s Summit Inn, where Tristram St. Lawrence and Desmond Hickey first meet, may be seen here:  http://www.thesummitinn.ie/

The photo of the Criminal Court of Justice in Dublin may be found on  http://www.courts.ie/